A fast paced, stylish RTS that offers a unique gameplay experience.
Alright, so I bought Battle Realms when it first came out at my friend's suggestion. At first I was a little reluctant but after playing it for a few hours I really got into it.
The game is based in a fictional Asian setting. You've got four clans which are pretty unique to each other in terms of unit types but the overall playing mechanics are similar. i.e. similar resource gathering.
Talking about mechanics, the way units are trained is very unique and I loved it. After you build a hut, or a house (usually the first building you construct), you automatically start generating peasants at a fixed rate. (more houses increase that time but not too dramatically). The rate actually is that of exponential decay in that as your pop. grows your rate decreases. The fact that the pop. limit of this game is 40 should give you an idea of how fast paced this game is (should be anyway). I've actually never reached that limit. The closest I got to was around the mid 30s, but ideally both of you would have done a lot of fighting by then.
This leads to the training of units. The way units are trained is quite innovative as well. You send your peasants that have been generated into various buildings and there they get trained. Suffice to say it is a nice change from all the other RTSs where you simply train units out of literally nothing. Here you actually send peasants to get trained. If you don't want to micromanage individual peasants, you can of course make waypoints.
The battles are fun to watch. The graphics are very colorful and bright, and the combat plays out well. You've got the blasts, fire, slashing, each unit making noise, so it feels like how a real battle would be. One of my fav things about combat was how ranged units adjusted when being attacked by a melee unit. For example, the dragon clan has archers. When a wolf clan brawler closed in on the archer, the archer didn't just keep shooting at point blank range like in many other RTSs. Instead, more realistically, the archer starts wacking the brawler with the bow. Things like this made the fights very enjoyable to watch and more believable.
Each unit is also quite unique and memorable, much like how Team Fortress 2 has divided their classes into unique ones. I still remember the loyal samurai of the dragon clan to the thievish ways of the serpent clan sharpshooters, to the savage wolf clan berserkers, and the disgusting lotus clan Diseased ones. Add to those characteristics the individual abilities which they can learn that add more flair to the battles and you've got a very fun RTS game that will appeal to those looking for a different type of experience.